They buy coats they can get their arms in, no more thought goes into it than that. And they all buy Adult Size Large, and they fit into them, and unless they are particularly unbroad or bird-chested it fits them more or less fine.
And I am screaming at the night sky, now, outside, so my breath turns to fog on the cold of it: if we are all Adult Size Large, then why do we have so many differences? I feel that somewhere in the grey unknowable magic of this size there’s something approaching peace: Adult Size Large transcends race, and sex, and gender, and age and height and weight. Adult Size Large is the t-shirt that more or less fits everyone. Can we not come together and appreciate that? Put down your guns, brothers. Unprime your bombs. Deep down, we are all the same. Come, unite with me, in the fields of peace. There is no need to fight anymore. We all have more or less the same-sized torso. I don’t understand how but let’s try and work it out.
I’m staring at a poster in the camel museum. At the centre of the poster: a large, cartoon impression of a camel. Out from the camel, in little squiggling offshoots, photos of camels pulling various different-but-extremely-similar camel faces. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and you will see nothing but glassy tranquillity staring back. Gaze into the eyes of a camel and it will calmly blink and chew cud. But no, this poster says. Camels contain multitudes. ‘APPEAL OF CAMEL PERSONALITY,’ it reads. ‘Family Bond’, ‘Sensitive’, ‘Loyal’, ‘Smart’, ‘Defending’. The next attribute is portmanteaued into one with a backslash: ‘Bossy/Leaders’. And there, hovering up around the original cartoon camel’s ear area, a single word, in rigid black: ‘Fear’.
Everything is camels and camels are everything, here at … the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, Saudi Arabia!
* * *
CALL: Why were you at a camel festival in Saudi Arabia?
RESPONSE: Because it was there, and when something is there, it is human nature to go and look at it.
CALL: What is a camel festival like? What is a camel festival?
RESPONSE: I don’t know exactly because the camel festival I went to started being constructed in March 2017, i.e. six weeks exactly before I arrived in Saudi Arabia to come and look at it, so necessarily was entirely incomplete, and actually on balance I saw far fewer camels than you might have expected me to, on the whole, seeing as I flew all the way to Saudi Arabia to go and see camels,
CALL: What actually was it then?
RESPONSE: It was basically just a big car park with a load of camels in it. I flew seven hours and drove two. That’s what it was. It was a car park full of camels, in Saudi Arabia.
CALL: Would you highly recommend the camel festival as a fun continental tourist retreat?
RESPONSE: No I wouldn’t go so far as to say the word ‘highly’, no.
* * *
So I am in a tent, later now, trying to understand the appeal of camels. At my feet: a discarded tray-plate of grilled chicken, Gulf Sea prawns, rice, fruit, om ali, a pudding that is essentially cornflakes soaked in milk and warmed up with some cashews in it; to my right, a small cushion-plinth on which is resting two (two.) disposable paper cups of Arabian coffee and a larger plastic cup of sweet chai. The sun is blurrily setting and the sky turns dark from blue. There is a boy whose job in the tent is seemingly to bring me tea and coffee whenever I hold up a hand to say ‘tea’ or ‘coffee’. When he is not bringing me tea and coffee he just stands on the balls of his feet, staring covertly at the TV. There is something unusual about seeing a huge, clean-new HD TV plugged into a tent: in amongst rugs lining walls to deflect the searing heat of the sun, one perfect clear window, a slash of tech amongst the sand. On the television is an old BBC Two show where modern-day families live life for a day as either a slave or a lord in a Downton Abbey-style home, dubbed in Arabic. Earlier: a British nature documentary, where for some reason the monkeys in it were dubbed to have voices, and somehow, despite speaking Arabic, here, the monkeys have British accents. The refreshments boy brings me some more chai. I have been in the sun for ten hours and I am delirious. The monkeys are British and the camels are beautiful.
‘It’s like,’ the translator, Ali, is telling me. ‘It’s like … young men, you know? To show off they have some money … it’s like: a camel.’
I say: ‘Right.’
‘So it’s like … horses. Or: falcons. You have falcons?’
‘No we do not.’
He is incredulous.
‘You don’t have falcons?’
‘We don’t have falcons.’
‘Ahhhh: that’s why you liked the falcons.’
Earlier we saw some falcons and yeah, alright, I’ll be honest: I lost my shit about the falcons. I liked the falcons.
‘Huh.’
For a moment we both pause in the heavy, heavy heat, trying to think of a British equivalent to camels that aren’t horses or falcons. ‘I guess,’ I say, and I am thinking of Instagram, and how the people I follow who are in a good place in their life use it, and what they show off about, and how they might mark the occasion of their good fortune and express it through ownership of an animal. ‘I guess … dogs? Pedigree dogs? Like a bulldog?’
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